Friday, September 28, 2012

Sheila Black

Coup de Foudre“Somehow I outlived a stormy night with snow on my eyelids” Yusuf KomunyakaYou fell around me & into every palpablething—rhododendron, cracked sidewalk. Theworld became stranger. You fell around me andeach time it was slightly different, a glitter of iceon boots, the hush as under an elevated train,white noise breeding silence, an under-ground life, furtive, quickening like preyin gun-sight. And often as if from another life,a picture of walking through and aroundthe blue chambers of longing which foldedin on themselves like chambers of thenautilus, which wills itself to sink down intothe pink sand of the bottom, whatever isuntrammeled, virgin. Once on a circularstair, I stopped before a small round peepholea vision of sky in which I glimpsed you, winkingeven-star, ice planet, space-that-never-was,untenable and quick-vanishing as snow.***Poem for a Birthday(for Duncan)Don’t say a word, just breathe on the windowand trace a shape. If it is a branch may it flower,weighted with the green globes ofpears. If it is a birdlet it rest on the tallest branch, breathe in amore crystal air.Let it flap its wings, ascending throughthe layers untilit feels a stranger to itself. Letif fly home. Let it be the rabbit whose quickheart pulses in the tall grass.Let it run and pastthe window and into the whiteworld, and the moon in the morning, and the starswhich no one can see.***For John KeatsYou wait for the last carriage orit has arrived—horse breath,chestnuts in bloom, a circle ofwhite. A spot spreads on a cloth—crest of the red poll—thinstripped poppy—a brightness youcould not help but love. I cannotbe mistaken in that color, yousaid. This is arterial blood and Imust die. In a heaviness of night,I wake confused, my left arm burns,nerves throbbing, and I touch itto cool plaster. You kept walking,I am sure of it—descending MaidaVale to Marleybone, a pallorof skies, the tap rooms, stables,a linden in new leaf in whichyou struggled to read the fortitudeit takes to love. A critic writes thatyour poems, until almost the last,are never about despair—the selfcollapsing inward, but always aprojection outward—songbirdsscaling a space that unreelsto silk. In my night room—thepitted walls, I grow afraid a daywill come when I cannot picturethe lark ascent—blues ineffableas taste. Bitter and uneasy in mind.Yet at the end you tried to comfortyour friend—you said, for you hadseen it before, Death is coming.It will not be so terrible. Poor Severn.***Paso Del NorteThere would have been a reason to settlehere, perhaps when the river rose,the rows of concrete-poured housesplaster saints, Christmas lights. At the edgetarmac roads decline to dirt, beyondthe chalked squares of developments,stalled by recession, scrub, mesquite.Above the bridge by Fort Bliss: It’s a good dayto be a soldier. The legends of desert battle:the men who marched off into nowhere.In Flaubert’s story St. Julian I’Hospitalierthe boy who wishes to be great murders amouse, and this small death ignites a bloodhunger so acute, every day the boy rides outdriving his horse until its mouth turns white.He slaughters the foxes, the water birds, thestags in the deep woods, pushing a whole herdinto a small river; and the red of the water pleaseshim, he loves it as he loves no person, scheming tokill the wife who has betrayed him, until, cursed,he murders both his parents instead--his swordpushing through his mother’s white shawl.This is the valley of bones where nothingcan grow. Blood-strain dimming behind his eyes,he redeems himself, carries a leper through high waters,pressing the man’s open wounds against hisown. A story about hunger and its slow slaughter.Behind the gates of Fort Bliss, the young boyswith shaved heads wait for their transport toa desert much like this one. The same spitin their mouths, tang of dust, blood-rust,longing—the red of the water, the stags leaping.The Saint of Hospitality is the murderousboy. He becomes the host who carries us allacross. I would not stop him from passing through thiscity: Passage of the North where the migrantsslide across the dessicated river, abandoningnames and shoes. On the corner walking past uslike ghosts, and we touch them, even when wedo not touch them—not even with our eyes.